Dave Hickey is, to put it mildly, saddened to see the small circle of beauty within which he's spent most of his life—contemporary art—decay into a predictable, safe, formulaic money-driven enterprise. His many essays on beauty add up to a valiant attempt to rescue the contemporary art world from self-inflicted self-satisfaction. If he really has abandoned the ship of art criticism, the beauty for which he's battled will be the lesser for it.